Decline & Glory
October 9, 2020 – January 9, 2021
Brussels
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Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present Decline & Glory, an exhibition of new paintings by Jill Mulleady, the artist’s first with the gallery. Activating the gallery’s existing architecture, a Neoclassical-inspired late nineteenth-century Maison Bruxelloise, Mulleady stages a sequence of paintings en enfilade, with implied narratives threading between the works and the rooms of the installation. In one work, Gardens of the Blind, a chiaroscuro figure appears amidst the turbulent forces of a whirlwind and a burning landscape. The same figure is seen again in the yellow interior of 18 Rue Souveraine 1050, where she seems to have aged and is now illuminated by another fire – a psychic recurrence, or unextinguished memory. Still lifes of flowers mark the inexorable passage of time, with the same bouquet observed in different moments of decay (A Thought that Never Changes Remains a Stupid Lie). Here, a traditional motif allegorizes the seductive means by which power infiltrates our lives. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Sade sits in the solitary confinement of his prison cell, as if suspended in time between one sentence and another. Putting art historical influences in communication with fiction, Mulleady’s paintings invite the viewer to wander between shifting temporalities and the rooms and floors of the house where they are installed.
Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present Decline & Glory, an exhibition of new paintings by Jill Mulleady, the artist’s first with the gallery. Activating the gallery’s existing architecture, a Neoclassical-inspired late nineteenth-century Maison Bruxelloise, Mulleady stages a sequence of paintings en enfilade, with implied narratives threading between the works and the rooms of the installation. In one work, Gardens of the Blind, a chiaroscuro figure appears amidst the turbulent forces of a whirlwind and a burning landscape. The same figure is seen again in the yellow interior of 18 Rue Souveraine 1050, where she seems to have aged and is now illuminated by another fire – a psychic recurrence, or unextinguished memory. Still lifes of flowers mark the inexorable passage of time, with the same bouquet observed in different moments of decay (A Thought that Never Changes Remains a Stupid Lie). Here, a traditional motif allegorizes the seductive means by which power infiltrates our lives. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Sade sits in the solitary confinement of his prison cell, as if suspended in time between one sentence and another. Putting art historical influences in communication with fiction, Mulleady’s paintings invite the viewer to wander between shifting temporalities and the rooms and floors of the house where they are installed.
Painting on the surface of an antique mirror rescued from a nearby house just before it was demolished, Mulleady projects a phantasmatic scene upon the material fact of a found object. Responding to the existing neoclassical elements of Gladstone Gallery, the artist has updated the high ceiling on the ground level with a motif of rotting fruits. Decline & Glory haunts the gallery’s bourgeois maison, interweaving traces of historical time and expressions of psychic life, site-specific interventions and imagined realities, to stage a dynamic encounter between painterly vision and the context of its display. Another still life depicts an octopus tangled within the complexity of its own form – an image of a changeling intelligence, momentarily adapting itself to any space whatever. A turbulent seascape, shows a massive wave gathering force beneath a bloody sky. Like de Sade in his prison cell, the wave is suspended in time, pictured just before the breaking point: a painted surface is the outer face of a chaos without limits, change beyond measure, cresting to meet the eyes.
Jill Mulleady was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1980, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Kunsthalle Bern (2017); and Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli (2015). Recent group exhibitions include international exhibitions such as “May You Live in Interesting Times,” La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019); and “Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods,” Casa Luis Barragan, Mexico (2019). Her work is included in prominent institutions around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In March 2020, Mulleady debuted a new public artwork, “We Wither Time into a Coil of Fright,” on the façade of 95 Horatio Street in New York, presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and High Line Art. Later this year, Mulleady will present a new series of paintings at the Hammer Museum and The Huntington in “Made in L.A. 2020: a version.” In May 2021, Mulleady will be included in L'Almanach 20 at Le Consortium, Dijon, France. Mulleady will soon release two new books, “Angst for Angst,” published by Kunsthalle Bern, and “Fight or Flight,” published by Swiss Institute.